Tucked away in Siberia there are furry four-legged creatures with wagging tails and floppy ears that are as docile and friendly as any lapdog. But despite appearances these are not dogsthey are foxes. They are the result of the most astonishing experiment in breeding ever undertakenimagine speeding up thousands of years of evolution into a few decades. In 1959 biologists Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut set out to do just that by starting with a few dozen silver foxes from fox farms in the USSR and attempting to recreate the evolution of wolves into dogs in real time in order to witness the process of domestication. This is the extraordinary untold story of this remarkable undertaking.

Most accounts of the natural evolution of wolves place it over a span of about 15000 years but within a decade Belyaev and Truts fox breeding experiments had resulted in puppy-like foxes with floppy ears piebald spots and curly tails. Along with these physical changes came genetic and behavioral changes as well. The foxes were bred using selection criteria for tameness?? and with each g